


It’s Gonna Be a Bumpy Night!

by jazzfic



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Christmas, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-22
Updated: 2014-12-22
Packaged: 2018-03-02 19:49:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2824022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzfic/pseuds/jazzfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was like a meet cute from the movies. Snowed in with your stupid, stupid crush.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It’s Gonna Be a Bumpy Night!

“Here you go, Miss Sae. Happy holidays.”

“Same to you, honey.” 

He watched her hoist the book bag over one arm, wrangling the other into the sleeve of a thickly padded jacket. The automatic doors opened and a quick blast of chilled air flew in, causing a momentary eddy to whirl about near the pamphlets set up by the front desk. Peeta stuck out a hand to catch _Family History and Your Library_ before it smacked into the screen of his computer. He waved again to old Miss Sae and shoved the piece of paper back into the rack. Outside the wind blew, whipping pieces of trash across the library’s small parking lot. The sky was low and tinged a flat grey-white, not ominous exactly, but suggestive of something about to come. Like the shadow of a dragon, whipping long and silent over the town as it flew from some high mountain crag... 

Thresh sidled up to him, messenger bag slung across his body, and Peeta jumped out of his daydream. He’d been staring at that _Game of Thrones_ display for too long. 

“Think I’ll make it before the real flurry hits?” Thresh asked with a grin. 

“You better hope.” Peeta gave him a disbelieving look. “Only you would ride a freaking bike in this weather.”

“Speak for yourself, man. You’re the one who walks to work. Hey, have a good one. ‘Tis the season.”

Peeta grunted, trying not to completely fall off balance as Thresh knocked him again for good measure with one meaty shoulder. The guy had a point, he supposed. But he was going to ignore it. It was one of his many attractive and abundant talents, after all. What else would see him ringing in the Yuletide eve in the local library, home to the fellow strays and stragglers, those without parties or happenings or loved ones to get home to. His own eternal kin. “Yep. Merry Christmas,” he said to himself.

The wall clock read 3.28. An hour and a half and he could close up, stick his head to the wet and sodden ground and trudge home to a reheated bowl of pasta and whatever his DVR had recorded that he had perhaps an 18% interest in watching. It was what it was; to say he didn’t care would be lying, but he wasn’t unhappy living alone. So what if he’d maybe grown apathetic and more than a bit of a grump? He still had people who cared about him. They weren’t necessarily related to him, is all. He’d long since accepted this, and as far as Peeta was concerned, blood meant shit when it came to family. 

Still. There was a reason why in _It’s a Wonderful Life_ was among the most borrowed of their small collection of worn dvds year after year. And why Peeta, alone and in the dark, still swallowed hard over the things he missed.

 

::

 

Technically the circulation desk _had_ a microphone, but technically it had been broken for almost four months now, and besides, for all his sweet and level-headed disposition, there was something about having an excuse to shout into a draughty and echoing room that tickled the small part of Peeta that wasn’t always so sweet and sturdy. The part, if he were honest, that wanted to boss people around and maybe scream a few heads out of the way. 

At exactly ten minutes to five Peeta cleared his throat and threw his voice with gusto. “This library is now closing, folks! You know the drill. Please bring your reading materials to this here desk and form an orderly such and such, so we can et cetera, et cetera you out into the lovely snowdrift! Thank you.”

Okay, so it wasn’t to script, but let’s face it, there were at most six people in the entire place, including the guy doing the shouting, and he wasn’t exactly evacuating a Walmart. He watched as a few people emerged from various pockets of the room, and set about getting them out the door as quickly as possible. He murmured pleasantries about the holidays, and made noises of slightly more worried agreement about the snow, which by now was starting to fall pretty heavily. 

Fifteen minutes later, and he was wandering the shelves and humming tunelessly, scanning every tucked away corner for signs of life. Except after a minute he realized there was another sound, skipping a few discordant notes above his own voice. It was the wind. Peeta glanced out of the windows. He could see cars moving, but slowly, creeping against the increasing flurry. A shiver ran through him. He wasn’t exactly planning on spending Christmas eve stuck at his workplace, maybe Thresh had been right, and – 

“Umph!”

– and he never got to finish that thought because the world was suddenly tilting to one side and, before he could do anything the ugly library carpet rushed towards him and Peeta landed in a pile of magazines, in between... somebody’s leather boots?

He spat out a dustball. “What the hell?”

Grey eyes stared into his. A pair of lips, pressed pale in annoyance, pulled apart to speak. But her words were drowned out by the voice in his head, which he figured must have consumed about eleven espressos, because he could have sworn it was jumping up and down in triple time.

 _Katniss! Everdeen!_ the voice begged him to say. “Why are you even here?” he got out instead. “Shouldn’t you be with the Hawthornes, or – or something?”

They were still tangled together on the floor, Peeta and his fellow carpet-lover. A jolt of insecurity spun through him, turning flush into guilt. It was the ‘or something’, the stuttered mess slipping from his tongue like only a true loser could manage, that really killed it. And he knew that she was thinking the same thing. 

“No,” said Katniss shortly. She frowned hard, and looked like she was going to say more, but stopped. Their legs were entwined, her jean clad knee pressing into his upper thigh, close to... Peeta felt his cheeks flare; he could smell her hair, a clean, bracing smell, like she’d been blown in from the cold. Before his brain could wrestle his reactions into submission his eyes had darted of their own doing to the vee of her shirt. He saw the outline of white lace, a camisole draped loosely over the tops of her breasts. “Um,” he said, pointlessly, scooting back. “You do realize --”

“I was hiding,” she blurted. 

“What?”

She let out an exaggerated sigh, big enough to fill the whole room. “It’s stupid, okay.” 

“Yeah, it kind of is.” Peeta smiled hopefully; she glared at him. He waited. He wasn’t going to push her. He could count on one hand the number of times Katniss Everdeen had allowed a conversation between them to last beyond a couple of sentences before one or both of them ran away. If he stood back and thought about it objectively, it was a next-to-nothing relationship, and a pretty pathetic one at that, seeing as they weren’t exactly kids, either, and didn’t have the excuse of inexperience to fall back upon. Peeta could just about say that he was intimately familiar with the _back of her head_ , and no more. Except when he thought of her (which he did, often, embarrassingly often) it was the shape those three locks of hair made twisted in that braid of hers that came regular as night. 

Well... and that, followed by the rest. 

Peeta bit his lip, hard. Something weird and not exactly comfortable was taking him close to the edge here. One word either way could spell disaster, especially now that they were bordering on being stuck in this place for real. 

He stood up with a sigh. “You can tell all later,” he said, holding a hand out, which she ignored, clambering upright by herself. “I’m, uh. Look, I’m supposed to close up. It’s not a crash all hours place, you know.” He stared out of the windows. “And it’s really, really crap outside. I gotta get you home.”

“What, you gonna piggyback me?” 

She stared him down, her voice flat and unamused. But he caught a glimmer of something in her eye, something open and accepting. He let out a shaky laugh, and to his immense relief she did too. If there was any luck, any dumb Christmas goodness left about the place, he thought, that might settle on his shoulders right now, it would surely blow every layer of awkwardness away – and god help him, let him stay a moment longer with Katniss freaking Everdeen. 

Peeta took a breath. “If I have to,” he said softly.

And then the lights went out.

 

::

 

In the short time while Peeta stood hunched over a filing cabinet in the staffroom, searching for the flashlight he knew was rattling around in there somewhere, he experienced a moment of clarity that lasted approximately two seconds, but felt as if it could power him for the next forty years. He backed away, blinking into the gloom. Katniss was hovering nearby – he could hear her breathing – and he twirled the flashlight with a cluck of satisfaction and clicked it on. The circle of light jumped around the room, landing on her face. She winced and tilted her head away.

“Sorry,” said Peeta.

He was glad it was so dark. And that this was kind of an emergency situation. And kind of scary, if he thought too much about it. Because he had an excuse now; he could be brave and dumb and it didn’t matter because something bigger than them was happening. It was like a giant, metaphorical mistletoe, locked in the guise of a snowstorm. He was almost certain they were both here for the same reason. They’d just arrived in opposite directions. Hell, it might actually turn out nice.

Peeta clicked the torch on and off. Then he did it again. As the strobe caught Katniss’s hard expression, he grinned. She rolled her eyes. He cleared his throat.

“Okay, um. Welcome to the after dark reading hour. I’m Peeta Mellark, and for this festive month of December I’ll be reading from that controversial and very saucy tome--” He reached blindly into the filing cabinet again. “ _Windows 95 for Dummies_. Wow, that’s... twenty years old.”

“Peeta.”

“I know, I know.” He dropped the book and nudged past her, back into the library space. Muttering to himself, he felt in his pocket and held up his phone. “Sorry. I’m just gonna call this in. It shouldn’t take too long.”

“You can’t get the power back on?”

“I could try.” Peeta smiled, safe in the knowledge that she couldn’t see. “But there’s kind of a protocol for these things, and you chose the wrong night to get stuck with the least rebellious guy in town.” Now she’d stopped and had her head cocked, watching him. Okay, so maybe she could see. Maybe she had night vision, or moonlighted as a bat. She definitely spent enough time out there in the woods. Off her look, Peeta shrugged gamely. At some point he was going to run out of things to blab about, and there was only so big a pit of self-deprecation he could dig on his own, so she had to give him something to work with at some point, surely. He could only hope. “What, you don’t want to camp out here, under the magazines?” he asked, drilling down through his contacts until he landed on the building manager. “I could find that enormous book of old maps and make a tent? Scary stories won’t be a problem, we’ve got at least thirty-nine copies of every Stephen King novel in existence... I swear, that guy could write a DIY manual on home-kit endoscopy and people’d still read it...”

Something brushed his shoulder as he held the phone up to his ear. It was Katniss, bouncing up on the wide circulation desk with all the grace as if she were negotiating a branch, and there she sat, one booted foot tap tapping away at the mock woodstain finish, watching him quietly as he called in the small disaster unfolding around them.

 

::

 

“You need to call somebody? Your sister?”

“I texted Prim already, while you were looking for the flashlight.”

“She okay at home with your mom?”

“Yeah. We do the drills, we’re prepared. I don’t think this is going to turn out too bad, anyways. I mean, look at the shape of it.”

“Huh?”

“The shape. Look how it’s falling, the snow, look how the wind’s taking it.” She eyed him, a little narrowly. “You’re the artist, aren’t you? Where’s your observation skills? Prim’s going to give me all sorts of grief knowing I’m stuck here with you.”

They were sitting on the desk together. Peeta frowned. Her abrupt change of subject had thrown him. “I’m sorry?” He didn’t mean it as a question, but his voice hitched at the end like he was twelve again, and this made her laugh. He realized suddenly how much he loved that sound, how her whole body shook; he could feel it all, even without touching her.

“No, it’s good,” she said. “Trust me. Be flattered.”

“Okay, I will.” He was still a little confused, though, uncertain how to respond to her boldness. And something else was nagging at him, too. “How’d you know I draw?” 

She picked up his hand. “Calluses. You’re like bark, you’re all raw, exposed.” In the dim light, he watched the shape her mouth made, small and still behind a wave of hair that had fallen free from her braid. 

But he had as much rebuke in him as he had agreement, so he curled his fingers and Katniss let go.

 

::

 

Heavensbee called. He didn’t sound worried. In fact, Peeta could have sworn he could hear glasses clinking and the sound of echoey, festive chatter in the background. He also could have sworn that the guy was chewing something down (possibly a shrimp or champagne something) while he delivered self-serving a monologue about half the town being cut off and basically their only options at this point were a) sit it out or b) sit it out and read a damn book. 

Peeta hung up.

“Well?”

If he were in any way open to embracing madness in a what the hell, it’s Christmas, sort of way, and not so anally retentive and hugely awkward that the ring and middle fingers of his left hand were at that exact moment counting the lines of his corduroy pants in sets of threes, Peeta might have kissed her right then and there, smack square on the waiting expression on her face. 

It was like a meet cute from the movies. Snowed in with your stupid, stupid crush. 

Instead he drew all the sass he could muster into his voice, and in the best Bette Davis he could manage he drawled out, “Fasten your seatbelts–” just as the battery in the flashlight blew with a _pop!_

Silence bloomed around them, slightly hysterical and slightly hilarious. Full of the world ending. 

“Oh, shit!” he squeaked. 

 

::

 

Maybe, Peeta thought, that was their thing. Lights going out. Weather blowing in, weather silencing them. Snow falling and smothering them. Maybe this was the only way they’d ever speak and have a normal conversation. 

Or – 

Maybe he should just kiss her. It wasn’t like he didn’t have four foot of snowdrift to throw himself into afterwards.

Still, if her reactions to his inadequate preparedness for disaster were any indication, then he must be doing something right. Peeta might have been well and truly hurt if he wasn’t so chaotically in love.

Coughing away his blush, he took her hand. "Hang on,” he said. “I’ve got an idea." 

 

::

 

“Where are we?”

“Just a minute, you’ll see...”

He knelt onto the carpet, his fingers feeling their way around the base of the fake pine tree until he found what he was looking for. Peeta grunted in triumph as Katniss gave an audible gasp, and the world around them lit up in sparking colour.

They had traversed the vast space and reached the far reaches of the darkness. Otherwise known as Panem Community Library Kiddies Corner. Which consisted of three soft, squishy chairs, a set of very low bookshelves, and Christmas being Christmas, an enormous plastic tree.

And now to that setting he could include Katniss Everdeen, smiling a genuine smile, her face lit up in green and red.

“Batteries,” said Peeta, crawling on his hands and knees until he reached her side. He paused minutely, as much as bravery would give him, then reached for her hand and tugged her down, gently. “You never know when you’ll be in dire need of a set of fairy lights in a storm.”

Sat next to him cross-legged, she let out a small, embarrassed huff of breath, half hiding from his gaze. “Oh my god,” she murmured, “are you always this...?”

“This?”

He bumped her shoulder with his own, teasing out a grin. Katniss sighed and and shook her head. Not for the first time, Peeta felt warmth flare in his cheeks. Ridiculous. They were ridiculous. Was this flirting? he wondered. Why was instant regression to all the awkward nonsense of a fourteen-year-old so freaking instantaneous when it came to this girl? Who the hell could say. But every second of silence in which he somehow managed not to fill with an apology he counted as a small victory. 

She gestured to the lights, opened her mouth, then gave up, waving her hand weakly. He could hear the amazement in her voice. “Prim would love this. God, Peeta. She’d eat it up...”

Outside, the wind howled, while inside, Peeta forced himself to stay still, to wait and watch as her dark head turned towards him. _Why is it so easy with you?_ He longed to blurt out about a hundred sappy, heartfelt, truly cringeworthy questions, right then, there as good as a place as any, as if there mightn’t be a tomorrow. 

She stared at him in the dark. He stared back at her.

For a long time it remained quiet, and they didn’t speak. A heavier comfort descended. Then, gradually, they came to life, conversationally, in incremental steps. They watched videos on his phone, played eye-spy (localised to a five foot radius; it was a game unfairly weighted towards children’s books and Sesame Street plush toys), talked about mutual acquaintances, who’d stayed and who’d drifted away. They rehashed old wounds with math teachers. They argued quietly about superheroes, real and not.

“My dad was the best person I knew,” said Katniss softly. Peeta had gotten up on a snack scouting mission a few moments before; now her fingers were dipped into a pack of Skittles, but as she spoke they stopped moving, and the combination of the weight of her words plus the crinkling of plastic made him want to both smile and pull her head against his shoulder. 

“I miss him so much,” she added. So he did both. 

She was warm, her breath steady, not sad, he thought. Only very, very open and considered. He knew they were in a bubble here, whether it lasted beyond the night or whether he could somehow find a way to puff it gently into existence again, he didn’t know. 

He didn’t want to wonder.

“I’m sorry.”

She lifted her head. “Why?”

“It’s Christmas eve. You should be with your sister. And your mom. Not here, stuck with... a guy who can’t even pack proper survival rations.”

But she laughed, a sharp, cutting sound. “No.”

“Yes,” he said.

He held his ground. He held _her_.

Katniss touched his cheek, dipping her voice down low. A window by their heads shook with stinging pelts of ice, and rattled until he felt he was being shaken awake, matching the thump thud of his heart. “Well, too bad,” she said. “Because I am.”

 

::

 

So Peeta had lied. 

As it turned out, the least bumpy night on record passed without bang or bombshell, and was now just another anecdote to be shared on a rainy day. 

None of it mattered anyway. The sky could freeze over or fall to the ground, because right now there was only one thing Peeta gave two thoughts about, and that was the fact that Katniss Everdeen had kissed him. Kissed him first under flickering lights on a child-sized couch, and kissed him last as they stood in the front lobby, at 5.00 am on Christmas day, before an audience consisting of a baffled and sleepy Heavensbee, and one amused looking electrician come to release the mechanism on the doors. Who listened to Peeta’s tale, shrugged his shoulders and wondered what on earth these darned kids got up to these days. 

Peeta, meanwhile, was thinking maybe a crush was stupid only if he named it so, as he watched her leave his snow surrounded library with tinsel in her hair.


End file.
